IN THEIR PURSUIT of the working-class vote in the local elections, Respect and the British National Party could do worse than to campaign jointly.

Although this might appear an unholy alliance, each party believes itself to be the traditional voice of socialism. While door-knocking in Bethnal Green during the general election, George Galloway, the leader of Respect, would always claim that he represented old Labour values; the literature being distributed by the BNP states: “We are the Labour Party your grandfathers voted for.”

Which Labour Party would that be? The one that an unprecedented number of trade union members deserted to vote Conservative in 1979? Or the one that some trade unionists joined at the fag end of the 19th century while also supporting the right-wing British Brothers’ League and its campaign for restricting immigration. That campaign was partly racially inspired, but it was also a response to the impact of large numbers of Jewish émigrés on housing and jobs in the densely populated East End.

To add to the confusion, after research by the Joseph Rowntree Trust reporting that a quarter of voters are considering voting BNP, dissident Labour backbenchers are having their say. They believe that new Labour’s wooing of “middle Britain” in marginal seats makes traditional Labour voters feel neglected, hence their turning to the BNP.

This is a brilliant piece of doublethink, and highlights a schism that has existed between the Left and the white working class since those trade unionists took against immigrants arriving in Stepney en masse in the 1890s. First, the Left always maintained that the far Right was dormant throughout the 1980s because the Tories were in power. Now it transpires that the far Right’s support is that of disgruntled Labour voters.

Secondly, the Left happily champions the collectivism of the white working class when it is defined in terms of its labour or union traditions, but ignores it when it is a matter of ethnic identity. Yet white working-class Londoners long felt themselves to be united by colour, and by a unique urban culture that existed from the 1880s until the 1960s; one that was built around local work, the pub, the market and attachment to place and neighbourhood.

If this sense of identity created an insularity, it made them no more insular or racist, than any other ethnic group. Indeed, they might ultimately have proven to be more flexible than others. While this class is bound up by a sense of belonging to a street or neighbourhood, it has also been subject to much more upheaval than other groups — whether from redevelopment or high immigration. Despite its bigots, the turf of these white working-class postcodes has bred inter-racial relationships and the cross-fertilisation of cultures. It’s here that the multiculturalism that has been so beneficial to middle-class liberals, with its curries, carnivals, Ukrainian nannies, Bosnian cleaners and cut-price Polish plumbers, was created.

The break-up of communities in those inner London areas in the 1960s, due to New Commonwealth immigration and the exodus of many whites to the suburbs, has now reached outer boroughs such as Barking and Dagenham. A little bit of history is repeating itself; old antagonisms and the fear of the far Right have re-emerged.

Margaret Hodge, the Employment Minister, has alerted the media to the prospect that a high proportion of white residents in her Barking constituency, and neighbouring Dagenham, plan to vote BNP. She explained: “They can’t get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic communities moving in and they are angry.”

That same housing story can be found in the recently published, The New East End. The authors, Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, have continued the work of Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s classic 1950s study, Family and Kinship in East London. Their theme is that by the time postwar social housing had been built in East End in the 1960s, priority was being given to the immediate needs of new arrivals at the cost of long-established local families. They had to live in overcrowded conditions, and crawl up lengthy lists for council homes. “As a result”, confirms the research in The New East End, “it was often migrants and the homeless families who benefited when housing was allocated.”

Whether in the 1890s, the 1960s or the present, the changing character of working-class neighbourhoods leaves the Left in an uneasy bind. It is what David Goodhart writing in the centre-left magazine, Prospect, in 2004, referred to as the “progressive’s dilemma”: “The Left’s recent love affair with diversity may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.” In short, if the white working class feels let down by anyone, it is by those on the traditional Left.

That’s not to say that the BNP is likely to become the party of the white working class in the polls. Despite the rebrand, you wouldn’t have to look too far to find the bigotry that motivates the party. But racism doesn’t necessarily provide the impetus for those turning to it as a protest vote. Housing, jobs and immigration will always ensure that the populist far Right will occasionally have a spring in its step on polling day.

But the current percentage of prospective voters flirting with the BNP is a modern phenomenon, and one that perhaps owes more to the mood created by the prevailing orthodoxy of multiculturalism. Growing working-class willingness to vote BNP is not necessarily because of an endemic opposition to multiculturalism, but more an objection to the debate around it. It’s a discussion that fails to consult them; it’s a discussion in which they are daily cast in a dual role: as a dying breed, and as a racist blot on the landscape preventing multiculturalism reaching its true Nirvana.

If this “protest” vote does live up to the worrying forecasts, it may have little to do with the BNP’s flimsy excuse for a manifesto. Perhaps it’s simply that in an age when every racial or religious group demonstrates its right to be offended because of a lack of representation, the white working class has decided that it is its turn to take offence.





Michael Collins is the author of The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class

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